Question 16913 — public finances

Summary

Mr. Abdelkader Lahmar draws the attention of the Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industrial, Energy and Digital Sovereignty to the methods of recovery of criminal and quasi-criminal fines entrusted to the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP), as well as to their economic and social effects. The French system of financial sanctions is today based on close coordination between the authorities of fines, judicial authorities and state recovery services. Once the fine is issued or increased, it is transmitted to the general directorate of public finances, which has extensive prerogatives in matters of forced recovery. This system has gradually intensified with the increase in the number of fixed fines and fixed fines for torts, leading to a significant growth in volume of public debts recovered administratively. Several research studies in sociology and public economics have highlighted that mass financial sanctions can produce debt accumulation effects, particularly in the most precarious populations, for whom the immediate payment of a fine can lead to a shift into procedures of increase and then forced recovery. These analyzes agree with the findings made by several organizations defending fundamental rights, which warn of the social effects of the accumulation of fines, automatic increases and administrative seizure procedures. In its June 2026 report entitled “Paying the price for police harassment – ​​Discriminatory fines targeting young black and Arab people in France”, Human Rights Watch, jointly with (Re)Claim and the House community for inclusive development, describes situations in which people, often young and residing in working-class neighborhoods, accumulate a very high volume of fines, leading to significant debts with the tax administration and repeated forced recovery procedures. These elements question the capacity of the current system to guarantee proportionality of sanctions and to prevent structural debt situations linked to low-serious offenses. However, despite the quantitative importance of the fines recovered by the DGFiP, there is no detailed publication allowing us to assess the reality of this debt, its territorial and social distribution, as well as the concrete methods of recovery. With the aim of transparency of public action and evaluation of financial penalty policies, he asks him to kindly communicate, for each of the last five years available, the total number of debts resulting from criminal or quasi-criminal fines taken care of by the general directorate of public finances, as well as their overall amount; the distribution of these debts according to their origin, in particular fines; fixed fines; fixed tort fines and automatic increases; the amount average and median of debts held by those liable for fines, as well as the distribution of these debts by installments (less than 100 euros, 100 to 500 euros, 500 to 1,000 euros, 1,000 to 5,000 euros, 5,000 to 10,000 euros, more than 10,000 euros); the number of people subject to one or more active recovery procedures for criminal fines, as well as the number of people accumulating several debts simultaneously; THE number of forced recovery procedures implemented each year, in particular administrative seizures from third party holders (SATD); seizures of remuneration; bank seizures and other coercive recovery procedures; the total amount recovered each year for criminal fines, as well as the effective recovery rate in relation to the debts issued; the number of free discounts granted, their total amount, as well as as their acceptance rate; the number of people accumulating a significant volume of fine debts, in particular those subject to more than 10, 20 or 50 active debts simultaneously, as well as, when these data exist, the socio-territorial characteristics of these situations (age, sex, geographical location) and the indicators, if the tax administration has them, making it possible to assess situations of over-indebtedness linked exclusively to criminal fines and tort fixed fines. He would like to know whether the Government has carried out or plans to carry out an assessment of the social effects of the forced recovery of fines, particularly on the poorest households, in accordance with the warnings formulated by several academic works and organizations defending fundamental rights. Finally, he asks him if the Government is considering publication in open data of data relating to the recovery of fines by the DGFiP, in order to allow independent parliamentary and scientific control of the economic and social impact of financial sanction policies.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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